New York and California Introduce Legislation to Ban Plastic Microbeads in Cosmetics

Design matters more than recycling. Microbeads don’t make the cut, designed to wash down the drain into your local waterway. They are irrecoverable and therefore never recycled.

Microbeads, those little polyethylene scrubbers in facial cleansers, are now on the way out thanks to the one-two legislative punch. The New York state district attorney’s office proposed a bill to ban microplastics in cosmetics, followed by the same bill introduced to the California legislature a few days later by Assemblyman Richard Bloom. These two markets, if lost, will drive producers to reconsider putting microbeads in future products.

Presumably the 1/3 mm beads come from poor waste treatment, either using sieves too large to capture microplastics, combined sewage overflow pumping raw sewage into the lakes on heavy rain days or using treated solids full of plastic as fertilizer on public lands. One or all of these three sources are responsible for hundreds of microplastics floating from our cities.

“Legislation levels the playing field,” said Stiv Wilson of 5 Gyres. The ball began rolling early last year with another organization in Europe called the Plastic Soup Foundation campaigned heavily resulting in the company Unilever banning microbeads in their products by 2015.

“After our research teams found the first evidence of microbeads in the environment, we felt confident to launch our campaign,” said Cummins. Soon Proctor and Gamble and Johnson & Johnson began making noise about phasing out microbeads on a multi-year time line.

Despite these voluntary efforts, we pressed for legislation. We’re confident is will pass.

As the world's population grows and the planet warms, demand for water will rise but the quality and reliability of the supply is expected to deteriorate, the United Nations said Monday in this year's World Water Development Report.

"We need new solutions in managing water resources so as to meet emerging challenges to water security caused by population growth and climate change," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a statement. "If we do nothing, some five billion people will be living in areas with poor access to water by 2050."

Despite a court-ordered injunction barring anyone from coming within 5 meters (approximately 16.4 feet) of two of its BC construction sites, opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion sent a clear message Saturday that they would not back down.

Twenty-eight demonstrators were arrested March 17 after blocking the front gate to Kinder Morgan's tank farm in Burnaby, BC for four hours, according to a press release put out by Protect the Inlet, the group leading the protest.

Climate change is a big, ugly, unwieldy problem, and it's getting worse by the day. Emissions are rising. Ice is melting, and virtually no one is taking the carbon crisis as seriously as the issue demands. Countries need to radically overhaul their energy systems in just a few short decades, replacing coal, oil and gas with clean energy. Even if countries overcome the political obstacles necessary to meet that aim, they can expect heat waves, drought and storms unseen in the history of human civilization and enough flooding to submerge Miami Beach.

Trump has loudly declared his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, but, behind the tweets and the headlines, U.S. officials and scientists have carried on working with international partners to fight climate change, Reuters reported Wednesday.

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't make this up. One day after new data revealed widespread toxic water contamination near coal ash disposal sites, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt announced a proposal to repeal the very 2015 EPA safeguards that had required this data to be tracked and released in the first place. Clean water is a basic human right that should never be treated as collateral damage on a corporate balance sheet, but that is exactly what is happening.